Phoebe Bridgers: Lost Weekend

An extremely moving, deeply impressive work of musical design from one of our most important living songwriters

“Crying in a suit and tie / But you should see the other guy / One more time for old time’s sake / I’ll watch him get carried away.” There’s the formal attire, then the dad joke, then the adage; by the fourth line, we know we’re at the funeral. Gentle synths drone far back in the mix, a quiet needle drop sounds as though underwater or in slow motion; the vocal comes in, through an intense vocoder processor, up close—the soundstage is massive. As the verse continues—“Fist through the dry wall / I’m frozen in place / But not afraid”—the vocal starts to emerge from its electronic backing in a seriously impressive piece of sonic design, and by the chorus, we have our strongest sense yet of that particular feathery timbre, that instantly-recognisable voice. But, as this voice liberates itself from the machine, the couplet it sings is in many ways its most devastating yet: “When I am on the outside, watching / I am on the outside, watching.” It’s a beautifully redundant turn of phrase, which for me evokes something of “If I could give you the moon / I would give you the moon” from 2020’s Punisher, and evokes too a sense of speaking before thinking, emotion running its course ahead of syllogistic tautness.

So begins Lost Weekend, and so proceeds Lost Weekend. Floating free from embodied experience, watching oneself from the outside, disaffection, violence, remembering and forgetting—these have been the domain of Phoebe Bridgers’ inimitable songbook since the start. But what marks Lost Weekend as a new turn in her art is the sheer looseness in her language here. Plenty of verses make sense at the local level, but coalesce rather impressionistically at the macro level. Lead single “Lost Boys”, for instance, seems full of cryptic meaning that Bridgers intentionally wards off speculation about. “This machine is killing me / I pretended it was make believe // Lost boys / Never grow up, never go home” goes the pre-chorus as it spills its truncated 6-bar phrase into an anthemic chorus. But you ask yourself, What machine? That aforementioned motorbike of the first verse? And what do lost boys have to do with it? Still, it’s anthemic, indeed—“Lost Boys” is about as far as Bridgers indulges her (considerable) skill for hook writing on this album; backed by a trumpet counter melody, the song too is conventionally structured. And so, as a lead single, it’s perhaps a bit of a misleading one. It finds a perfect antonym, structurally speaking, in the track that follows, “Kill Me”, which sets out as a guitar-led number trading verses and choruses, and then swerves into a massive instrumental wash in what I can only describe as a musical jumpscare. It’s brilliant, though, for how this change-up is seeded earlier, in the chorus’ “incomplete” lyrics. “This is gonna kill me / Wait” is the refrain, and it's exactly where Bridgers was about to say “Wait” one last time that we’re dropped into new sonic territory and we find out what really awaits us: “Let’s go missing”, she commands.

A doubleness of meaning marks all of the love songs on this album, and there are a pleasant many love songs. Love looks good on Bridgers, largely because it also looks terrifying—“Let’s go missing” is both a death wish and a suggestion of a secret little rendezvous. Later, on the exalting rocker “Bobby”, whose lyrics are shot through with violent imagery, she knows both that “This could be the end of wanting” and that “This could be the end”, full stop. We say we “fall” in love, after all, and the ensuing shock is what she captures on Lost Weekend. The musical material is similarly shocking, eclectic, large in scope. I’ve already mentioned the sudden changes in texture and dynamic (see “Kill Me”, “Lost Weekend”) and the clever way that instrumentals are recorded and mixed to evoke a massive space whose depth seems to be constantly changing (see “The Outside”, “Still Standing”, “I Can’t Wait”). And while this album is probably the most impressive musical construction that will be released this year on a sheer technical level, made by the best of the best on the finest of digital equipment, for me the overall effect is almost analogue, like switching channels on a TV or tuning a radio.

The other channel streaming parallel to boyfriend Bobby concerns Bridgers’ father. Boys are a major subject on the record, as the thread of love songs suggests, but the real lost boy is the one who’s no longer with us. He gets the finest song, “Still Standing”, which is harrowing and extremely moving as it recounts childhood memories of domestic violence and of feeling misunderstood. Like any good child of a difficult parent, Bridgers knows to “Thank [him] for everything” in the song’s final turn—and we know all too well by this point what that “everything” includes. But, crucially, we also know it to include Bridgers’ stubbornness, her backbone, her strong sense of self: She stood up to her father, and that made her who she is today. The chorus comes as a dependent clause, attaching itself to all which came before; the guitar slides in, warm and capable—“But I’m still standing / Top of the stairs, wearing red / Pound for pound in a prom dress.” The melody encircles itself, self-confident and easily tuneful—but with a missing downbeat in each measure. Its compelling mix of strutting and stumbling make this song one of Bridgers’ best.

The only thing missing on Lost Weekend, for me, is a more sustained meditation on the father figure. “Panorama” begins with a long instrumental and then a short vocoder verse: it seems to introduce a kind of “second act” to the album for how it mirrors the opener, “The Outside”. But as this second half goes on, the love songs creep back in. It’s almost disconcerting—Bridgers is so known as contemporary music’s “indie sad girl”—and the other song that deals with her father, “As Above”, perhaps suffers from a touch more of that impressionistic style than is effective. That song’s set on an aeroplane as Bridgers travels (presumably) to her father’s funeral, and it swings between addressing Father and Boyfriend rather interchangeably (think less Sigmund Freud; more Lady Gaga’s “Speechless”). Bridgers arrives at a powerful bridge in a full belt—“You won’t have to believe in magic / Leave it to me, and I’ll make it happen”—but the song thus far has not necessarily earned this climax by accumulation of tiny details or by sustained musical drive as she so masterfully did on 2020’s “I Know The End.” Nonetheless, the sudden changes in temperature and elevation seem to be Bridgers’ point—the song’s literally set on an aeroplane—and Dad still haunts everything here on Lost Weekend; the album is dedicated to him, and its blown-out energy seems to orbit his ghostly presence.

Now I shall rattle off a list of names: Jack Antonoff and Ethan Gruska bring exceptional production work; Rob Moose is back with his sinewy and elegant string writing; Caroline Shaw contributes stunning vocal arrangements that teeter on the edge of cheesy in a way that only she can; Christian Lee Hutson plays an array of guitars beautifully. This is how I imagine Marvel fans felt going to see Avengers: Endgame. And on the namedropping note, there’s clearly a few lyrics here that reference Bridgers’ high-profile breakup with actor Paul Mescal and his new relationship with fellow songwriter Gracie Abrams. “She can pretend to be me / Since she took my place in my bed on that stage / I have not lost any sleep” are the lines in question. With their lack of ensuing or preceding explanation, they might be the first time that a Phoebe Bridgers lyric has needed a gloss, and are one of the few spots on this album where Bridgers’ cryptic approach doesn’t quite work. Of course, Bridgers has written before in dream-like imagery about real-life scenarios, but a song such as 2017’s “Motion Sickness” is a damn good piece of work whether or not you know or care that it’s about Ryan Adams.

So I should confess that it has taken me quite literally weeks to accept Lost Weekend for what it is: When you know Bridgers to be the kind of formal genius that can stir up a cup of tea until it brews a storm, it might take you a moment to permit her to do something different as she does on this album. These are deceptively simple songs dissolved into larger instrumental washes, and they purposefully ward off the kind of speculation that their often-cryptic lyrics seem to invite. It’s a tough line to tow for a songwriter because it risks dispelling its drooling, eager audience—but Bridgers pulls it off (there are lyrics here for us poets to enviously gawk at for years). There’ll be many surprises on the first listen to this impressive record; what surprised me most was the faint but steady note of hope, “Never going back again” to when someone now-gone was still alive, and “Never going back again” too to where one suffered, was misunderstood, or detached from feeling. This lost weekend was only a lost weekend, and time pulls in one direction—until the music pulls us back.